ST. VITALIS, MARTYR

From Fortunatus,1.1, carm. 2, p. 33. His acts and
the supposititious letter under the name of St. Ambrose were written
only in the ninth age.

ABOUT THE YEAR 62.

ST. VITALIS is honored as the principal patron of
the city of Ravenna, in which he glorified God by martyrdom in the
persecution of Nero. He was a citizen of Milan, and is said in his
acts to have been the father of SS. Gervasius and Protasius. The
divine providence conducted him to Ravenna, where he saw a Christian
named Ursicinus, who was condemned to lose his head for his faith,
standing aghast at the sight of death, and seeming ready to yield.
Happy is he who, by a perfect diffidence in himself and a sincere
humility, obtains strength and comfort from above in the fiery trials
of his last conflicts; when the devil rages with the greatest fury,
knowing that he has only a little time to compass the ruin of a soul
forever. Vitalis was extremely moved at this spectacle. The honor of
God, which was in danger of being insulted by sin, and the soul of a
brother in Christ which appeared to be upon the very brink of
apostacy, were alarming objects to awake his zeal. He who dreaded the
presumption of rashly seeking the combat, knew his double obligation
of preferring the glory of God, and the eternal salvation of his
neighbor to his own corporeal life: he therefore boldly and
successfully encouraged Ursicinus to triumph over death, and after
his martyrdom carried off his body, and respectfully interred it. The
judge, whose name was Paulinus, being informed of what he had done,
caused him to be apprehended, stretched on the rack, and, after other
torments, to be buried alive in a place called the Palm-tree, in
Ravenna, as Fortunatus and his acts relate. These acts add that his
wife, Valeria, returning from Ravenna to Milan, was beaten to death
by certain peasants, because she refused to join them in an
idolatrous festival and riot. The relics of St. Vitalis are deposited
in the great church which bears his name in Ravenna, and was
magnificently built by the emperor Justinian, in 547. It belongs to a
noble Benedictin abbey, where in a ruinous private chapel are shown
the tombs of the emperor Honorius, and of the princes and princesses
of his family.

We are not all called to the sacrifice of
martyrdom; but all are bound to make their whole lives a continued
sacrifice of themselves to God, and to perform every action in this
perfect spirit of sacrifice. An ardent desire of devoting ourselves
totally to God in life and in death, and a cheerful readiness to do
and to suffer whatever he requires of us, in order constantly to
accomplish his divine will, is a disposition which ought to accompany
and to animate all our actions. The perfection of our sacrifice
depends on the purity, fervor, and constancy of this desire. We must
in particular make our bodies and our souls, with all their
faculties, continual victims to God our bodies by patient suffering,
voluntary mortification, chastity, temperance, and penitential labor:
our souls by a continual spirit of compunction, adoration, love, and
praise. Thus we shall both live and die to God, perfectly resigned to
his holy will in all his appointments.